The Meritocracy Myth

We love to believe that talent and hard work determine success. That the cream rises to the top, that excellence is rewarded, that outcomes reflect merit. This is the meritocracy myth—one of the most persistent and damaging delusions of modern society.

The idea sounds fair on its face. Who could argue against rewarding talent? But scratch beneath the surface and the machinery of inequality reveals itself. Because meritocracy assumes a level playing field that has never existed.

Start with access. Elite universities claim to admit the “best” students, but legacy admissions, donor preferences, and test prep industries costing thousands ensure that wealth buys not just education, but credentialing. The SAT doesn’t measure intelligence—it measures the ability to afford preparation. The résumé gap doesn’t reflect ability—it reflects who had access to unpaid internships their family could subsidize.

Then there’s visibility. In workplaces, promotions often go not to those who do the best work, but to those whose work is most seen. This benefits extroverts over introverts, self-promoters over quiet contributors, and those who “look the part” over those who don’t fit the narrow template of what leadership supposedly looks like. Confidence gets mistaken for competence. Assertiveness for authority.

The meritocracy delusion also ignores systemic barriers. A brilliant student in an underfunded school faces obstacles that no amount of individual talent can overcome. A single parent working multiple jobs may have the intelligence to excel in any field, but lacks the time. A person with a disability may possess exceptional skills, yet encounter workplace environments designed without them in mind.

Worse still, meritocracy becomes a moral justification for inequality. If success is earned, then poverty must be deserved. If the wealthy are there by merit, then the struggling are there by failure. This logic erases history, context, and structural violence. It turns systemic injustice into personal responsibility.

The delusion serves power beautifully. It allows those at the top to feel virtuous about their position, convinced they earned it through talent alone. It prevents solidarity among those struggling, each convinced they just need to work harder, optimize better, hustle smarter. And it maintains the status quo by framing change as unnecessary—after all, the system already rewards the deserving, doesn’t it?

But here’s the truth: every “self-made” success story is built on infrastructure they didn’t create, luck they can’t replicate, and advantages often invisible to them. No one succeeds alone. And excellence without opportunity is a tree falling in a forest with no one wealthy enough to hear it.

To dismantle this delusion is to demand something harder than meritocracy: equity. Not sameness, but fairness. Not equal outcomes, but equal access to opportunity. Not the pretense of a level field, but the hard work of leveling it for real.

Because the alternative to the meritocracy myth isn’t chaos. It’s humility. It’s recognition that we are all more dependent, more lucky, and more complicit than we’d like to admit. And it’s the understanding that a just society isn’t one where cream rises, but one where everyone has a chance to rise—regardless of where they start.